More than 30 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine this weekend after a long operation to bring them back home from Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea, where they were taken from areas occupied by Russian forces during the war.
Mothers hugged sons and daughters as they crossed the border from Belarus into Ukraine on Friday after a complex rescue operation that involved traveling through four countries.
Dasha Rak, a 13-year-old girl, said she and her twin sister agreed to leave the Russian-occupied city of Kherson last year because of the war and go to a holiday camp in Crimea for a few weeks. But once in Crimea, Russian officials said, the children stay longer.
“They said they’d adopt us, we’d get guardians,” she said. “When they first said we’d be staying longer we all started crying.”
Dasha’s mother Natalya said she traveled from Ukraine to Crimea via Poland, Belarus and Moscow to get her daughters. Russia has occupied Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula since 2014.
“It was very difficult but we kept going, we didn’t sleep at night, we just sat up and slept,” he explained of his journey to the camp.
“It was heartbreaking to see the crying children left behind the fence,” she said.
Kyiv estimates that around 19,500 children have been taken to Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea since Moscow invaded in February last year, which it denounces as illegal deportations.
Moscow, which controls parts of eastern and southern Ukraine, denies abducting the children and says they were transported for their own safety.
“Now the fifth rescue operation is nearing completion. It is special because of the number of children we managed to return and its complexity,” said Mykola Kuleba, founder of the Save Ukraine humanitarian organization, which helped organize the rescue operation.
Kuleba told a Kyiv briefing on Saturday that all 31 children brought home said no one in Russia was trying to find their parents.
“There are children who have changed their place five times in five months, some children say they are living with rats and cockroaches,” he said. Kuleba said the children were taken by the Russians from occupied parts of Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Kherson regions to stay in summer camps.
The Russian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Arrest warrants
Three children – two boys and a girl – were present at the media conference in Kyiv. Save Ukraine came home last month in a previous operation that returned a total of 18 children.
The three said they were separated from their parents, who were pressured by Russian authorities to send their children to Russian summer camps for two weeks in the occupied parts of Kherson and Kharkiv regions.
Children at the briefing said they were forced to stay in summer camps for four to six months and were moved from one place to another during their stay.
“We were treated like animals. We were locked up in a separate building,” said child Vitaly from the Kherson region, whose age was not clear. He said his parents were told they no longer needed him.
Last month, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, accused of abducting children from Ukraine.
Moscow did not hide the program that took thousands of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories, but presented it as a humanitarian campaign to save orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.
Russia rejects the ICC charges, does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction and calls the warrants null and void.
Lvova-Belova said earlier this week that her commission acted on a humanitarian basis to protect the interests of children in areas where military operations were taking place and that no one was moved against their will or with the consent of their parents or legal guardians. They searched unless they were missing.
Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, a Ukrainian NGO, told the briefing that Russian authorities were gathering evidence to build a case for deliberately preventing the return of Ukrainian children.
“In each story there is a whole range of international violations that cannot go unpunished,” he said.
Source: Reuters
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